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It was quite a homestand for the Boston Red Sox. From June 2 through June 11, 1950, they played 11 games and scored 127 runs, an average of more than 11½ runs per game.1 They had just come off the road, where they had dropped their last three games. The Cleveland Indians came to Boston […]

“His hearty ‘glad to see you,’ and the warm grasp of the hand were the same as of old,” wrote the Boston Globe reporter who shook hands with Charlie Bennett. His eyes “twinkled merrily” during the interview at the apartment of Kid Nichols on Tremont Street in Boston.1 But this was not the same Charlie […]

“Well, it’s a strange way to lose a ball game,” said Ron Menchine, the Washington Senators’ play-by-play announcer, on WWDC radio.1 “It’s a strange way to wind up major league baseball in the nation’s capital … but I guess it’s been a topsy-turvy season, no one believed that there would not be major league baseball […]

Upon their debut in 2008, the Lehigh Valley IronPigs quickly became one of the highest-drawing teams in the Triple-A International League.1 The Philadelphia Phillies’ top farm team, based in Allentown, Pennsylvania, has established itself as a supportive community presence, hosted future stars on the way up, and played the merchandising and promotion game as well […]

When a franchise endures two consecutive decades of sub-.500 seasons there are bound to be some close calls to breaking the cycle over the ignominious years (1997 and 2012, when Pittsburgh finished 79-83), and then there are seasons that are outright catastrophes (like 2001 and 2009, when they finished 62-100 and 62-99). The Pirates’ 2009 […]

The 1986 Boston Red Sox went 95-66 during the regular season, their most wins in nearly a decade (99 in 1978), and won the American League East flag by 5½ games over the New York Yankees. It was their first postseason appearance in 11 years, since they lost the 1975 World Series to the Cincinnati […]

As of the start of the 2019 season, the San Diego Padres are the only existing major-league team that has not had a pitcher toss a no-hitter. While they have never had a no-no, the club has thrown 30 one-hitters.1 One of these one-hitters took place on Thursday, July 19, 2012, when journeyman Edinson Volquez […]

After the 50-day players strike in 1981, in which about a third of the season was eliminated, major-league club owners elected to divide the season into two halves, each with its own division champions. The Los Angeles Dodgers ended the first half of the season with a record of 36-21, the best in baseball, a […]

Twelve-year American League veteran Bobby Shantz made his National League debut in 1961, after a pair of transactions – an expansion-draft selection and a trade – brought him to the Pittsburgh Pirates. Opening the season in the bullpen, the 35-year-old left-hander soon was making spot starts to patch up the defending World Series’ champions’ rotation. […]

First baseman Candy LaChance was a switch-hitting 33-year-old veteran when his Boston Americans won the first World Series, in 1903. He played in every one of his team’s 141 regular-season games that year and each of the eight World Series games as well. That kind of “iron man” endurance wasn’t so uncommon at the time; […]

Born with a celebrated baseball surname1 but with only a modicum of playing ability, catcher Tom O’Rourke was largely a nonentity on the 19th-century major league ballclubs that he played for. But on occasion, he provided useful service. O’Rourke’s post-baseball life followed a similar pattern – but for an altogether different organization: Tammany Hall, the […]

Jackie Robinson in a portrait with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. (SABR-RUCKER ARCHIVE)   Jackie Robinson is perhaps the most historically significant baseball player ever, ranking with Babe Ruth in terms of his impact on the national pastime. Ruth changed the way baseball was played; Jackie Robinson changed the way Americans thought. When Robinson took […]

A career backup outfielder, Lynn Jones had nearly a 35-year career in professional baseball as a player and well-traveled coach and manager. Jones played eight seasons in the majors – five with the Detroit Tigers and three with the Kansas City Royals – before embarking on a coaching career that touched the lives of thousands […]

Health activities embraced by Larry Gura in 1976 were so unusual for a pro pitcher that veteran Sports Illustrated writer Bill Nack devoted a long newspaper article to them. “An idea fixed in conventional baseball wisdom is that a pitcher, of all people, should not involve himself in weightlifting, should not strain over weighted pulleys […]

Jim “Zipper” Zapp played a big role in getting the Birmingham Black Barons to the 1948 World Series against the Homestead Grays. It was a season that had seen a young rookie named Willie Mays spell him in the second game of a doubleheader. Zapp was a big right-handed outfielder, standing 6-feet-2 or -3 and […]

Floyd (“Jack”) Farmer, baseball and football star at Cumberland University (Lebanon, Tennessee), was the only player in the first 135 years of the major leagues to hail from that institution.1 Farmer enjoyed a solid debut as a second-half starter for the sixth-place 1916 Pittsburgh Pirates, and as an occasional double-play partner of 42-year-old Honus Wagner.2 […]

He was accused of gambling on baseball early in his playing career. He was acknowledged to have a serious alcohol problem, one that may have contributed to his death at age 50. His professional pitching record, for six major-league seasons and four at the minor-league and independent levels, was 109-161. On first blush, and in […]

A well-traveled catcher, Brent Mayne played with the Kansas City Royals, New York Mets, Oakland Athletics, San Francisco Giants, Colorado Rockies, Arizona Diamondbacks, and Los Angeles Dodgers. Used primarily in a platooning role against right-handed pitchers or as a late-inning defensive replacement, Mayne was remembered more for his defense than his offense. A strong-armed catcher […]

At 6-feet-4, and close to 300 pounds, Jumbo Brown lived up to his name.1 Part of baseball’s first wave of relief pitchers, the massive righty saw action in 249 major-league games, starting just 23. He compiled a 33-31 won-lost record with 28 saves and a 4.07 ERA. The Rhode Island native played with many of […]

Byung-Hyun Kim, or BK, as he was known to his teammates, was one of the first and most successful major-league players from South Korea. Although he is most remembered for devastating back-to-back blown saves in Game Four and Game Five of the 2001 World Series, those failures obscure the fact that for several years he […]

A turn-of-the-20th-century left-hander with a singular first name, Welcome Gaston’s brief major league career included events out of the ordinary, as well. During his October 1898 audition with the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, for example, Gaston started four National League games – but only two made the record books; his other two outings were called off before […]

Jersey City, squeezed between Newark Bay and the Hudson River, is a prime metropolis for a ballpark. For 50 years, it had one, an Art Deco edifice débuting in the Depression, thriving for the first half of its life, fading into deep neglect in the 1970s, and succumbing to eventual nullity in the 1980s. Within […]

“Nobody has ever called Shea Stadium a cathedral,” wrote George Vecsey of the New York Times after the last major-league baseball game was played there on September 28, 2008.1 Even so, for many it inspired love and loyalty that its handsome but dull replacement, Citi Field, could not. When New York City Mayor Robert F. […]

Editor’s note: This article was selected as a winner of the 2014 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award.   The Montreal Expos played 36 seasons (1969-2004). For the last 28, their home was Olympic Stadium – a cavernous concrete edifice built for the 1976 Summer Olympic Games. From the outset, “The Big O” was notorious: hailed as […]